Raid Recovery Tips

The Maxtor Onetouch III Turbo drive will be released as a 600 gigabyte (GB) RAID 0 model, and a 1 terabyte (1 TB, 1000 GB) RAID 0/1 model.  
RAID 1 can now be used with the OneTouch III Turbo 600 GB models with updated installation software.

Highlights

• User-configurable RAID solution
• Use RAID 0 for high performance disk striping or RAID 1 for automatic mirroring
• Up to 1 TB storage capacity
• FireWire® 800 for fast data transfer
• Oxford 924 chipset
• Pre-formatted for Mac; easily formatted for Windows®
• Available in RAID 0 only, and RAID 0 / RAID 1 (user configurable) configurations.

What does this mean?

Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo drives are shipped with 2 drives inside the enclosure. These drives are configured in such a way that the drive letter or volume spans both drives to make one large drive. This is known as RAID 0 or RAID Striping.

When data is written to this large volume, the data is "striped" across the two drives.  The stripe size is 64 KB. What this means is that a file written to the array is split into two parts, one for each drive. This translates into significant improvement in reads and writes because two drives can do the work of one in roughtly half the time. This usually means throughput of 30-40% higher than a single drive, and sometimes can be nearly 50% higher.

The file splitting is automatically handled by the operating system so it makes it a simple and robust solution for adding speedy storage or backup.

RAID is an acronym which stands for "Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks" which is not entirely accurate for the way RAID 0 is used because there is no redundancy. A RAID 0 volume needs to be backed up but is extremely fast.

The following illustration shows how data is arranged on the two drives in RAID 0 and RAID 1:

RAID 0/1 drives support both modes, requiring a reformat to switch the mode. The RAID 0/1 version of the OneTouch III Turbo is expected to ship within a few weeks of the RAID 0 model.